


The Time Is Out Of Joint

by ERNest



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: F/M, M/M, POV Second Person, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Inevitability of Tragedy, Time Loop, questions game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26041765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Hamlet the Dane has come unstuck in time.(originally posted on LJ in 2011)
Relationships: Hamlet/Horatio (Hamlet), Hamlet/Laertes, Horatio/Ophelia
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	The Time Is Out Of Joint

You remember dying – silence and then a great bustle of people taking care of the bodies. It was terrible and you felt hints of the monsters you feared since you were young. And then something shifted and you were back in Horatio’s arms, alive and well for a few more minutes. “Horatio, I’m dead,” you gasp before you’ve noticed that you’re not yet. You long to embrace him and cover him with kisses, but your arms are too heavy, so you just let him rock you to sleep.

You close your eyes and when you open them again you’re back in Wittenberg, breathless and dizzy and in love. “I’ll never leave you,” you promise, and it’s true. You will always circle back around for him, for the times your father was alive, for the beautified Ophelia. Oh god, Ophelia! You love her too, even as you nibble on Horatio’s ear and whisper sweet nothings. You can’t remember if that was before or after this moment.

“I’ll be with you at the end,” he says back and you love him for that because you were just there, when he never left your side.

“Thank you.” Then because you’re young and have all the time in the world, you show him just how grateful you are.

A semester passes in the blink of an eye and you get the news that your world has just ended. You hate this part because this is when everything starts to go to hell. You remember it all so vividly and can’t do a thing to stop it and you want to avoid that entire chapter forever. You take your leave of Horatio and go back home with tears in your eyes.

Two hours ago you were attending a horrible funeral turned wedding and now it’s a play about infidelity. It hardly feels like you’ve moved at all. You remember talking to the players about their craft. Several cried with the mobled queen, who lost everything. Poor Hecuba made you think of Ophelia, who went mad and had too much of water always. Forty thousand brothers could never add up to your love, but yours can’t hold a candle to a man and a fictional queen. But wait! Ophelia’s right here next to you, and you’re nowhere near a graveyard. You stare at the girl like she’s a something nothing there and reach out towards her, but you’re too afraid that you won’t be able to touch her, so you don’t even try.

“Hamlet, what’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not yet,” you answer. “But I’m about to.”

She probably didn’t hear that last bit because you’re already on the watchtower, waiting for the spirit of buried Denmark. He comes and tells you revelations about your uncle you knew already. He makes you swear and you make your companions swear –– four times for them, but twelve for you because you keep coming back here.

The bite of the cold steel brings you back to your teenage years and Laertes is giving you lessons in fencing. He’s miles better than you and you resent it, but when he leaves for France after the royal funeral, you practice harder than ever because you’ll need experience before you attempt regicide. You slash and cut furiously and ineffectually because goddammit you were happy before and you’re tired of playing the revenge game.

Laertes takes you out behind the high school gym for a smoke. This is before you fell in love with his sister and before either of you held a sword. You can’t stop staring at his hands, long and graceful, and his mouth on his cigarette. You wonder what it would be like to hold that hand or kiss those lips, but you love Horatio, always have, so you say nothing. Perhaps he guesses, though, because he holds eye contact longer than he normally would.

You light up and stare at the smoke. It looks like a king of shreds and patches, and it tells you to shield your mother from herself. She’s a terrible, incestuous, adulterous woman, but you’ve loved many more people than she, and loved them all more than you thought possible. So you tell her you’re not mad at her, tell her you still love her. You don’t know how much more of this you can take. It’s exhausting to be spun through time like a coin, but there you go again.

“It hath made me mad,” you yell to whoever is near to hear you. Ophelia kneels in front of you crying. It occurs to you that as far as she is concerned you’ve just been calling her the most terrible names and you hate yourself for it. You press your forehead to hers and comfort her like you just comforted your mother later tonight. “To a nunnery, go!” You pray that this time she will do as you say and escape this madness, but you can’t stay here any longer to see what happens. You run out of the room and almost fall into a grave intended for one that was a woman, but rest her soul she’s dead. You fear that equivocation shall undo you all.

Several weeks before you will attack her fairness and honesty, you walk to her closet to see her again because she’s still alive and doesn’t remember what you have done. You will apologize for everything that hasn’t happened yet and take her away from prison. She seems happy but confused as you take her hand and you remember all the messages she returned unread. You know how this will end because you’ve seen it all before. You see her dead again and cry out for the pain of it. You want to remember her as she is, right this instant.

She stares at you in fear but she doesn’t know the half of it. You know that when she’s scared she goes to her father, so you leave first to get there ahead of her. You can’t stop yourself from looking back at her one last time though. You know a shortcut and are about to knock on the door but you hear voices so you lean closer to hear.

As you spy, you learn that Polonius also spies – and not just on you, either. Laertes, his own son, whom you know to be faithful and honorable in every way even when you weren’t, even he is not trusted and it makes you see red. You wonder how much this Reynaldo fellow saw. You wonder if it turned him on to watch you together. You wonder if he fell in love with Laertes’ strength and beauty as easily as you did. What kind of father would use his child in such a way, you ask yourself, but before you can ponder this too much, your father’s killer is dead by your hand and you are finally free of your task.

Laertes has forgiven you in his final breath, but he died before you could say everything you wanted to. “Heaven make you free of it,” you tell him, and you have faith that it will, because if Laertes is not free, what hope do you have? The poison’s already working and you start to drift away…

You’re on a boat and you need to choose between your life and that of your excellent good friends. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did make love to their employment; they deserve no mercy. You would die whatever happens, and this way Laertes might not. This could work; you never wanted to be king anyway. But you look at the letter in your hand and see that you’ve already switched them. Guildenstern is beginning to stir and there’s no way to switch the letters back without them seeing. In the candlelight the wax from the seal looks like blood staining your hands.

You are back in your mother’s closet and you tell her of your plans to blow the spies at the moon. She doesn’t understand your meaning, but you didn’t expect her to. You lug the guts into the neighbor room and the queen remains. No matter, they will both stay till you come.

You have just returned from a sea journey and you tell Horatio what you have done. He asks how you managed to seal it, but you know he’s really asking how you could betray your friends like that. You don’t know how to say that you tried to stop it from happening but got there too late.

“Horatio, what should I do?” you ask, because he always has the answers, even when he’s upset at you.

“What would you have me say, my lord?” he answers and you know all hope is gone because if Horatio can’t help you, there’s no help to be had. You start to cry and then you’re playing a different game of Questions in a happier time when there were still four of you.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“What counts as a ghost?” Guildenstern says at the same time that Rosencrantz asks “Well aren’t they everywhere?”

Horatio looks at you strangely and you wonder how much he knows. “Could they be memories?”

This definition startles you into saying “Am I a ghost, then?”

“Isn’t everyone?” asks Rosencrantz.

“What do you mean?” Guildenstern demands.

“What’s a person but a collection of memories?”

“Says who?”

“I thought you told me that!” Rosencrantz says and three voices chorus “Statement!”

With that, you’re back in school. During your grammar class you learn how to diagram sentences and identify them as exclamatory, interrogative, or declarative. You know this all and your teacher doesn’t mind when you take out a book to read. If she does mind she can’t do a thing about it because you’re a prince and you know how to exercise your power without overusing it. You write a letter to Horatio in the margents of Slaughterhouse V and send it to edify him. This is the first time you have ever done this, but you remember it will not be the last.

A few minutes later for you and several years later for Horatio, he still remembers how much you like to annotate. He grins at you and helps you pick Osric’s meaning apart. Together you diagram the boy like a sentence and create order from chaos, plant chaos where all was ordered. “Hat,” you mouth, and the lapwing runs away with his shell on his head.

When he is gone, Horatio speaks seriously again. “Do not go,” he pleads, “I fear you must fail.” You know he is both right and wrong. You will succeed in remembering your father as he deserves, but you will die when the duel is over. It may take some time for you to get there but it will come. You say as much to Horatio but with such wild and whirling words that he only worries for your health. He places a hand over yours and stays by you until the duel begins, but it is an uneasy peace between you, fragile as an eggshell.

It’s fragile as a small territory in Poland. You ask the captain of the Norwegian army what the point of conquering it is, but he can’t tell you. It’s a terrible waste of men and money, but so is stepping onto a boat, and you do that too.

As you board the pirate ship, Polonius boards you and tries to divine your purpose. He will never discover your goal, because it doesn’t stay the same from one moment to the next. Only part of this is a show. Part of it is context – when you’ve been, when you’re headed. Headed in the short term, you mean; everyone goes the same way in the end. You tell Polonius this by saying nothing, but like all fools and madmen he hears only what he wants to hear.

He thinks Ophelia is the cause of your distraction, and you almost wish that were the case. Lovesickness is easier to deal with than tidings of regicide, fratricide, incest. But you don’t love Ophelia, though you once needed her near you because she was the only one to make you forget your fears. But she was never her brother and neither of them could be Horatio. You love all three of them so desperately, so fervently, but oh God, Horatio! You’ve been through so much together and you remembered it even when you were very small.

“Will you come out of the air?” Polonius asks and for a moment you’re not reminiscing anymore, but in another instant everything goes dark and tight and breathless.

“Into my grave?” you gasp once you’ve jumped back.

“Indeed,” he says, unflappable as ever, “That is out of the air.”

The old man asks to take his leave of you and you tell him to take your life. He murmurs a polite response and then he’s yelling about murder, so you take his life instead. No, no, this isn’t supposed to happen. It was meant to be the king your uncle hiding behind the curtain, not the father of two people you love. Everything is going wrong and you keep arriving too late to change your actions. Foreknowledge is a dangerous thing and you can’t help feeling guilty.

Guilt, you write to Ophelia weeks before this began, is a powerful motivator. You ask her to run away with you and escape all the insanity. The stars may look perfectly still, but you know that thousands of years from now the pole star will be different. The next time she sees you she tells you that she would love to and she loves you for asking, but that you must stay for the sake of Denmark.

You insist that you care not for the crown, that it rots from the inside out, so she holds your hand and helps you to be strong. You tell her that women are allowed to enroll in Wittenberg now and that you could easily write a letter of recommendation, but she refuses you.

You ask her when she stopped loving you and she says nothing. You answer Rosencrantz with riddles that also say nothing and he asks when you stopped loving him. But he’s wrong: you could never love him, not when he and Guildenstern had such a beautiful connection. There were multitudes of choices you failed at making, but you never touched this shining thing so far beyond your understanding. If you did nothing else, you managed to keep it from shattering.

You shattered your mother though, and you never knew it until the moment she’s about to die. “Take my napkin,” she insists, like a lady offering a favor unto her knight. But no queen had such an unworthy knight! You treated her worse than you did Ophelia, but you see now that she never once stopped loving you, that she was only worried for you. Even as she chokes on her own breath you are the most important thing in her mind.

You feel like a villain upon this realization. Well you know that a man may smile and be a villain, but that is not all. A villain may put on sadness like a mask, or play the fool to catch a king. A villain may lie, and you do.

You tell your childhood friends that doomsday is near, but it couldn’t be near enough for your liking. You play shadow games with them and imply that you have no ambition, but it’s a lie. You clasp their hands in a cruel parody of friendship, and then push them away from you just as violently, and you hate yourself for it.

Several years ago you take your first steps into the University and feel entire worlds as they are opened up to you. If you spent the rest of your life here you’d be content. You try to learn everything there is to learn, try every pastime man has devised to amuse itself. Even if you don’t like everything you can at least say you’ve done it once. You spend as much time as you can with Horatio and when you’re not with him, you wish you were.

You write a letter to Laertes “You should be with us; they have everything here. Forget France and study the world. I’m going to discover something no one ever knew before and I’ll need you by my side when I start to teach it.” And one to Ophelia “The pansies are all around this time of year and when I see them I think of you. But this scene would be so much more beautiful if you were part of it. Come to school here and never look back.”

You walk into the chapel in Wittenberg, kneel down, and pray that everyone in your world can be safe and happy.

You walk into the chapel in Elsinore, see your uncle praying, and take out a sword to cut his throat in the church. But this won’t make you happy. He’ll go to heaven while the man for whom you killed him is trapped behind forever.

You wonder if this is purgatory, reliving all your mistakes to atone for your sins. It feels like it, even if you are alive right now. There’s no reason to let Claudius escape this fate, if this is what happens when you are not in a state of grace when you die. You can’t stand that you’re walking away from this chance, but you’ve done it before and will probably do it again.

The time is out of joint, and the rest is silence.


End file.
